Her script was fine and feminine. Dearest Jerry, she wrote, I hope this finds you well and safe. I know you are doing all you can to keep our beloved country strong. Freedom!
He muttered under his breath. Did she mean that, or was it window dressing to lull any censors? He didn’t think the envelope was opened before he saw it, but he could have been wrong. Only one way to find out: he kept reading.
Things here haven’t changed much since the last time I wrote, she went on. Prices have gone up some, though, and the stores don’t have as much as I wish they did. If you could send me a hundred dollars, it would help a lot.
He breathed a sigh of relief. He had a hundred dollars in his wallet. He’d had good luck and a good partner at the bridge table two nights before. If that was all…
But it wasn’t. He might have known it wouldn’t be. Hell, he had known. You ought to tell me about your friends, she wrote. I never hear about how things really are at the front. Where are you exactly? Dover snorted. As if she didn’t know! What are you doing? How are you going to lick the damnyankees?
Jerry Dover didn’t snort this time. He sighed. He feared he knew what she was asking for. He’d wondered if she would. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but here it was.
And he was liable to end up in trouble on account of it. He’d end up in worse trouble if he told her the things she wanted to know, though. He sent a soldier after his second-in-command here, a bright, eager captain named Rodney Chesbro. “Don’t let them steal this place while I’m gone,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to the Intelligence people.”
“Find out how we’re going to kick the damnyankees in the slats?” Chesbro asked-yes, he was eager. “If they tell you, will you tell me, too?”
“If they say I can,” Dover answered, which was less of a promise than it sounded like.
He drove a beat-up Birmingham north toward Chattanooga. The road was in bad shape. He was glad no U.S. fighter-bombers showed up to strafe him or drop explosives on his head. It was only a few miles to Division HQ, but getting there took twice as long as he’d thought it would.
As always, the tent where the G-2 men worked was inconspicuous. Intelligence didn’t advertise what it was up to. If you didn’t need to talk to those people, they didn’t want you around. Dover wished he didn’t. But he did. A few words to a scholarly-looking noncom got him sent over to a Major Claude Nevers. “What can I do for you, Colonel?” Nevers asked.
“I have a problem, Major,” Dover answered. “I’ve got a lady friend who’s been quietly squeezing me for money for quite a while. I wouldn’t waste your time if that were all, but now she’s trying to get information out of me, too.” He showed the Intelligence officer the letter.
Nevers read it and nodded. “I think you’re right. She’s smooth, but that’s the way it looks to me.” He eyed Dover. “You realize we’re going to have to look at you, too?”
“Yeah,” Dover said without enthusiasm. “But you’d look a lot harder, and you’d have some nastier tools, if I kept mum and you found out about this anyway. So do whatever you need to do, and I’ll worry about that later.”
“All right, Colonel.” Nevers didn’t call him sir. “Most of the time, I’d remove you from active duty, too. But we’re strapped for men now, and I’ve heard more than a few people who ought to know talk about what a good job you’re doing. So give me the particulars about this, ah, Melanie.”
“Melanie Leigh.” Dover spelled the last name. “Brunette. Blue eyes. Maybe thirty-five, maybe forty. About five feet four. Nice figure. You’ve got the address there. I’ve been sending her cash now and then for years so my wife wouldn’t hear about her. She can’t live on what I give her, though. I have no idea if she has other guys on the string, or how many. I don’t know how she’d get word out, either-but she likely has a way.”
“Uh-huh,” Nevers said. “Send her this hundred she wants. Write her a chatty letter about the kind of stuff you do. Tell her funny stories, nothing she can really use. With luck, we’ll drop on her before she can write back saying that isn’t what she wants.”
“Tunnel requisitions,” Dover murmured. Major Nevers looked blank. “I understand what you’re talking about, Major,” Dover told him. “I’ll do it. Maybe I’m seeing shadows where nothing’s casting them, but…”
“Yes. But,” Nevers said. “Go tend to it, Colonel. We’ll be in touch.”
“Right,” Dover said unhappily.
When he got back to the dump, he had to explain to Captain Chesbro that he didn’t know how the Confederate States were going to drive the Yankees back to the Ohio by Wednesday next. Writing a cheery, chatty letter to a woman he feared was a spy wasn’t easy, but he managed. He let Major Nevers vet it before he sent it out; he didn’t want the G-2 man thinking he was warning Melanie. He left it and the money and an envelope with the major to mail. Then he tried to worry about logistics.
He got a call from the major that night-in the middle of the night, in fact. A noncom woke him to go to the telephone. Without preamble, the Intelligence officer said, “She flew the coop, dammit.”
Dover said the first thing that came into his mind: “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I know that,” the Intelligence officer answered. “We’ve had you under surveillance since you came to me earlier today.”
We? You and your pals? You and your tapeworm? You and God? Dover was silly with sleepiness. “How did she know to disappear, then?” he asked.
“Good question,” Major Nevers said. “I hope we find out-that’s all I’ve got to tell you. You’ve exposed a security leak, that’s for damn sure. I suppose I ought to thank you.” He didn’t sound grateful. Dover, yawning, didn’t suppose he could blame him.
Every time Major General Abner Dowling saw a pickup truck these days, he winced. The Confederates’ improvised gun platforms had caused him a hell of a lot of grief. Their flanking attacks had stalled his drive on Camp Determination and Snyder. They hadn’t made him fall back on Lubbock, let alone driven him over the border into New Mexico, the way the enemy probably hoped. But his men weren’t going forward any more, either.
And so he grimaced when a pickup truck approached Eleventh Army headquarters out there in the middle of nowhere, even though the truck was painted U.S. green-gray and he could see it had no machine gun mounted in the bed. No matter what color it was painted, guards made sure it wasn’t carrying a bomb before they let it come up to the tent outside of which Dowling stood.
He started to laugh when the truck door opened and a brisk woman not far from his own age got out. “What’s so damn funny, Buster?” Ophelia Clemens demanded, cigarette smoke streaming from her mouth as she spoke.
“The guards were looking for explosives, but they let you through anyhow,” Dowling answered. “You cause more trouble than any auto bomb or people bomb ever made.”
She batted her eyes at him, which set him laughing all over again. “You say the sweetest things, darling,” she told him. “Do you still keep a pint hidden in your desk?”
“It was only a half pint,” he said, “and now I’ll have to put a lock on that drawer.” That made her laugh. “Come on in,” he continued. “I’ll see what I can find. It’s good to see you, by God.”
“People I talk to aren’t supposed to tell me things like that,” the reporter said severely. “They’re supposed to say, ‘Jesus Christ! Here’s that Clemens bitch again!’” She was kidding, and then again she wasn’t.
“I never do things I’m supposed to. Would I be here if I did?” Dowling held the tent flap wide. “Won’t you walk into my parlor, said the fly to the spider?”
“That’s more like it.” Ophelia Clemens ducked inside. Dowling followed her. He did produce some whiskey, and even a couple of glasses. As he’d seen her do before, Miss Clemens-she’d never married-knocked hers back like a man. “And that’s more like it, too,” she said. “Thanks.”